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Knowing how well strawberries match with basil gave me the idea for a dish with a theatrical sense of fun about it. The aim is to replicate the look of a classic bruschetta — the Italian toast most often topped with tomato and basil — but to turn it into a dessert. By using brioche for the toast and an aged balsamic reduction you get rich, sweet flavours more reminiscent of french toast, and indeed you could definitely serve this for breakfast or brunch. But it’s also a simple dessert for rounding off a meal with flair. Confuse and impress your guests in equal measure! 🙂

Dessert “Bruschetta”

Recipe Type: Dessert

Cuisine: Italian

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 5 mins

Total time: 15 mins

Serves: 4 slices

French toast collides with bruschetta and deliciousness ensues.

Ingredients

1 punnet (250g) strawberries, diced

2 tablespoons caster sugar

1 handful basil leaves, roughly chopped

4 thick slices brioche

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon aged balsamic vinegar (or a balsamic reduction)

(optional) creme fraiche, to serve

Instructions

Combine the sugar and half of the basil in a pestle and mortar and grind together to make basil sugar.

Place the strawberries in a mixing bowl and add the basil sugar. Toss to coat the strawberries and set aside.

Lightly butter the slices of brioche on both sides. In a frying pan on a medium heat, fry the slices until nicely browned.

Top each slice generously with strawberries, sprinkle with remaining basil and drizzle with a little balsamic.

The Recipe

I’m still trying to pronounce the name of this recipe using the tips from Bizzy Lizzy’s original post On kakaós csiga and a moment shared (I think I’m slowly getting there!). Regardless of how you say it, Lizzy’s story grabbed me and the snails looked delicious so I added this recipe to my list. I decided a weekend away with friends would be the perfect time to give it a go — that way we could devour a whole batch fresh from the oven!

The Tweaks

I’ve not actually made this style of snail before, so as you’d imagine I didn’t fiddle too much. The recipe does give a couple of choices for ingredients. Firstly fresh or dry yeast — I had the latter on hand and used about 3.5g (half of a 7g packet) to roughly match 10g of fresh. I also chose buttermilk over soured regular milk (you never know, Jane might make pancakes with the rest of the carton 😉 ). I encountered one small issue when dividing the rolled dough into individual pieces. The recipe calls for a spatula, which I would also normally use at home when dividing dough. However, the spatula in our accommodation was quite blunt and crushed the roll too much on the first cut. I switched to a small sharp knife which worked out better.

The Verdict

Like any dough there is a bit of kneading and waiting time involved in this recipe, but other than that I found it nice and simple. The filling in particular is so easy to throw together and would be quite fun to experiment with. The end result is a delicious treat that is not too sweet — a good thing! As the snail is essentially a bread nothing beats one that is still warm from the oven. The chocolate is tastier when a little warm too. So while I’m sure you could keep them for a day or two: a) they just wouldn’t be the same, and b) how can you resist them that long! 🙂

Our assumptions about ingredients are sometimes limited by experience. Case in point: some years back I would never have considered using cardamom in a dessert. But why? I’ve been happily eating cinnamon with sugar my whole life! Sometimes it takes a new dish to open up a different perspective: in this case Galub Jamun. These fried dumplings are a popular Indian dessert and usually come laced with spices including cardamom. I guess you could trace back the origins of this rice pudding to my first taste of those sweet little delicacies.

Cardamom Rice Pudding with Caramelised Banana

Recipe Type: Dessert

Prep time: 5 mins

Cook time: 50 mins

Total time: 55 mins

Serves: 6

A rich, spiced pudding with a sweet edge.

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups medium grain rice

800ml milk

250ml cream

2 egg yolks

12 cardamom pods, lightly crushed

1/2 cup caster sugar

3 ripe, firm bananas, halved lengthwise and again crosswise

3 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons brown sugar

Instructions

Combine the milk, cream and cardamom pods in a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat and allow to steep for 10 minutes to infuse the cardamom flavour.

Strain the milk mixture to remove the cardamom pods and seeds. Return to the saucepan and add the rice and caster sugar. Bring to the boil again and gently simmer, stirring occasionally, until the rice is just cooked (about 30 minutes). Remove from the heat.

Whisk the egg yolks and combine well with the rice. Cover to retain the heat so the yolks cook while you prepare the bananas.

To caramelise the bananas add the butter and brown sugar to a large frying pan over a medium-high heat. Stir well to form a caramel sauce.

Add the bananas to the sauce and cook for 1 minute on each side, coating them in caramel.

To serve: spoon the rice into bowls, top each with two pieces of banana and drizzle with a little of the remaining caramel sauce.

Notes

Cardamom is a strong flavour which can be too harsh if eaten directly (unless very well ground). That’s why I prefer to infuse the milk and then strain it out, despite this requiring the use of more pods.

This is a rich pudding so the servings need not be large. You can tone it down by omitting the yolks and/or adjusting the balance of cream to milk as you prefer — but I like it nice and custardy!

One great thing about this recipe is it scales up with only a little extra effort, most of the work happens in one large pot!

Buerre blanc is a classic French sauce made with reduced white wine/vinegar and (as with so many French recipes!) a whole load of butter. The base recipe is so simple it’s easy to play with the flavours, you just need to be careful not to add something that will make the sauce split. To pair well with white fish, in this case I’ve toned down the butter a little, added lemon juice and the aniseed edge of tarragon. The result is a rich yet fresh sauce that lifts an otherwise simple dish to something mouth-watering.

Lemon and Tarragon Buerre Blanc

Recipe Type: Sauce

Cuisine: French

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 10 mins

Total time: 20 mins

Serves: 4

A fresh twist on a classic French sauce.

Ingredients

150ml white wine

Juice of 1 lemon (about 80ml)

6 strips lemon zest

Good handful of tarragon leaves, bruised

1 shallot, diced

140g butter, diced into 1.5cm cubes

Instructions

Combine the wine, lemon juice, lemon zest and shallot in a small saucepan, season with a pinch of salt.

Bring to the boil and reduce the liquid to a third of its original volume.

While the sauce is reducing, bring some water to a simmer in a medium saucepan.

When the sauce has reduced, strain it into a glass or metal mixing bowl.

Place the bowl over the saucepan of simmering water, then add a cube of butter and whisk in to the sauce.

Continue adding the butter, cube-by-cube, whisking constantly until it is all combined and the sauce has thickened.

Season to taste with salt and cracked pepper and serve immediately with white fish, steamed greens and roasted potatoes.

Notes

Be careful not to split the sauce — if the mixture is too cold or too hot as you add the butter, it will not form a stable emulsion. Whisking in a bowl over simmering water provides a steady and indirect heat that makes it easier to stabilise. (You can also add a spoonful of cream before the butter to improve the stability.)

Buttery sauces also go well with steamed greens, in this case especially broccoli which loves a touch of lemon.

This dish was borne out of an unexpected abundance of mushrooms in my fridge! Both Jane and her parents had found some beautiful swiss browns in the same week, so we ended up with a stack of them. With plenty of other produce from the markets a last-minute dinner party was in order.

Mushrooms this good deserved to take centre stage in an appetiser. I thought offsetting their earthiness with something fresh would make a good combination — hence the gremolata. Although a traditional gremolata would also include raw garlic, I prefer to add the garlic to the mushrooms to give it a little time cooking. Just enough to take off the edge, mind you, a bit of bite is still ideal. When our guests protested at my attempts to clear the leftover mushrooms from the table I knew I had a winner!

Lemon Thyme Mushroom Toasts with Gremolata

Recipe Type: Appetiser

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 10 mins

Total time: 25 mins

Serves: 6 (as an appetiser)

Thyme and mushrooms are a classic combination. In this recipe I use fragrant lemon thyme and fresh gremolata to lift the dish to another level.

Ingredients

500g swiss brown mushrooms

1 bunch lemon thyme, roughly chopped (tough stems removed)

2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

40g butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 lemon

100g parsley, coarsely chopped

Thin slices of sourdough toast, to serve

Instructions

Brush the mushrooms with paper towel to remove any dirt. Remove the ends of the stems, then chop through vertically into 3mm slices.

Heat a large frying pan over a high heat. Melt 10g of the butter with a touch of olive oil until the butter begins to foam.

Add a third of the mushrooms, season with salt and pepper and fry until starting to colour (but not quite cooked). Put aside and repeat with another two batches of mushrooms.

Return the pan to a medium heat and melt the remaining butter. Add the mushrooms, lemon thyme and garlic and fry for another 1-2 minutes, until the mushrooms are done, stirring to combine.

For the gremolata: zest the lemon into the small bowl with a fine grater. Add the juice of the lemon and the parsley then stir to combine.

To serve top each slice of toast with a generous pile of mushrooms and garnish with a teaspoon or two of gremolata (to taste). Tuck in while it’s hot!